FBI: As Gun Sales Soared, Violent Crime Fell. Again.

A new FBI report shows that while FBI NICS background checks (a proxy for gun sales) have soared nearly 82-percent over the past 15 years, violent crime has plummeted over 18-percent.

Anti-liberty Democrats keep screaming that there is an “epidemic” of “gun violence,” but the facts just keep proving them wrong, year after year.

The FBI this month released the 2014 edition of Crime in the United States, and it revealed that the estimated number of reported violent crimes decreased 0.2 percent when compared with 2013. And the estimated number of property crimes decreased 4.3 percent from 2013 levels.

Homicides with firearms in 2014 were down 3.9 percent on a year-over-year basis. Consistent with previous years of this ongoing work, the vast majority of these murders were committed with handguns, although all categories of gun murders were lower. Rifles of all kinds were involved in just 3 percent of gun murders in 2014, lower than the number of deaths attributable to knives, blunt objects, and even fists or feet.

While the one-year numbers may not look that dramatic, they are nonetheless important because they serve to illustrate the long-term, 20-year downward trend in crime in the United States is continuing.

Using NSSF-adjusted National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) data over a ten-year period since 2005, the best proxy we have for firearms sales, we see a 74.1 percent increase in background checks even as the violent crime fell 16.2 percent. The 15-year trend is even more dramatic, showing an 81.8 percent increase in NICS numbers even as violent crime fell 18.2 percent.

Put simply, more firearms in the hands of the mostly law-abiding American population have not yielded an increase in crime.

Reality utterly wrecks the narrative for sane people.

Unfortunately, we’ve seen very little indication that anti-gun progressives are sane.